Product Description Financial trader Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) runs over a poor black person, nearly fatally, while driving with his mistress (Melanie Griffith) through the Bronx. When drunken hack Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis) gets the story, McCoy becomes the central character in a tale of political and racial scandal that paints a social tableau of Manhattan with a very broad brush. From Amazon.co.uk Is it time, after the anonymous disaster of Mission to Mars, to give Brian De Palma's famously doomed film of Tom Wolfe's bulky novel Bonfire of the Vanities another chance? The uproarious ins and outs of the film's troubled production have become well-known via Julie Salamon's account of its making, The Devil's Candy, and fans of that might want to flick between page and screen to see just when Melanie Griffith caused untold continuity problems by having her breasts inflated. Techno buffs will surely appreciate the pointless but somehow wonderful trickery of an extended tracking shot at the outset that exists only to last a few seconds longer than the one in Orson Welles Touch of Evil (1958). Tom Hanks was rather better cast than was generally allowed, as "master of the universe" Sherman McCoy, who comes a cropper after a hit-and-run accident, since his nice-guy act shows intriguing cracks. And even Bruce Willis does his best on a hiding to nothing as the drunken writer. It is funny in parts, agonising in others, and misses Wolfe's tone--but somehow its failures might make it as symptomatic of the long-gone excesses of the early 90s as the novel was of the 80s. -- Kim Newman Synopsis A hit-and-run accident in the Bronx prompts a citywide conflict, fuelled by ambitious politicians, greedy lawyers and jaded ministers with a wealthy businessman in the centre of the controversy. Based on the best-selling novel by Tom Wolfe. From the Back Cover Sherman McCoy was Wall Streets Master of the Universe - and everything in his life was right. Then one night he took a wrong turn at the wrong with the wrong woman. And nothing has gone right since. Tom Hanks as McCoy, Bruce |Willis as a jaded journalist, Melanie Griffith as McCoy's self-centered mistress and Morgan Freedman as an outspoken judge ignite The Bonfire Of The Vanities, the quintissentail story of the go-for-it 80's. Based on Tom Wolfe's best seller and directed by Brian De Palma, this freewheeling film pokes hilarious fun at the glitzy Greed Decade. It's a comic circus so outrageuos a single spark could start a bonfire!